Each year I provide an update on mobile applications. Some of you may have read my previous report last fall on Planetizen.For 2013, there is a lot to share. The growth in mobile apps is amazing and increasingly they are supporting the things we do as planners. If you have apps that should be added to my growing list for 2013, please let me know.

The most basic of apps is those that share information. This is a simple way for planners to share information with users and for us as planners to obtain information that is helpful to us in our professional positions. This includes apps like:

America’s Economy: This app provides Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics information at the national and regional level for the leading economic indicators. Available for iPhone and Android.

Sitegeist: This app detects your location and then provides a variety of interesting pieces of data about the neighborhood, ranging from Census demographics, to popular FourSquare checkin locations. Available for iPhone and Android.

Singapore MasterPlan 2008: This is the only city I know of that has their land use master plan in the form of an app. It provides information on permitted land uses and densities for development throughout Singapore. Available for iPhone.

GNOi: The Greater New Orleans economic development agency provides information on economic development incentives for jurisdictions throughout the region. Available for iPhone.

PlanningVic: Victoria, Australia provide an app that allows users to enter an address and they will be emailed a planning report including information such as zoning, lot descriptions and other useful land use information. Available for iPhone.

A handful take information sharing to another level providing attractive graphics and flythroughs.

Stats of the Union: This app beautiful provides health care statistics at the county level for the entire United States.Available for iPhone and iPad.

Bay Bridge Explorer: This visualization app allows you to fly through and see the San Francisco Bay Bridge project in sigificant detail.Available for iPhone and iPad.

Sensing is becoming embedded in all kinds of apps. Sensing everything from your location, vibration, to noise levels.

WalkSafe: Android app that sense is a car is coming towards you while you are walking.

StreetBump: Collects data on potholes in the City of Boston while you are driving.Available for iPhone.

Hit the Pothole:Collects data on potholes while driving or bicycling for a number of cities.Available for iPhone.

The next big wave that I see coming are predictive apps. These are apps that forecast conditions based on historic and real time data.

Tiramisu: Provides real time and historic data on bus arrivals and number of seats on public transit in Pittsburgh. Available for iPhone.

CycleTracks: San Francisco County collects data from users about their routes, destinations, and purpose of cycling trips. This is used in the transportation modeling for the county. Available for iPhone.

Inrix: Never Be Late Again: Uses real time and historic data to provide alternative routes, estimated arrival times and locations of accidents and construction. Available for Android, iPhone and iPad.

Then there are apps that are designed to help support decision making. The Inrix app is an example of one that is both predictive and intended to help support decision making.

SF Park: Allows users to find the location, pricing and availability of public parking in San Francisco. Available for iPhone.

ParkPGH: Users can find information about the location and availability of spaces in parking garages in Pittsburgh. Available for iPhone.

Zoner: Provides information on the zoning of property in New York City. Available for Android.

Then there are the maps that encourage users to participate in crowdsourcing information.

ParkCirca: Allows users to find private parking spaces available for a fee in major cities. Available for iPhone, Android, and Windows.

OpenTreeMap: Used in San Diego, Philadelphia and Grand Rapids. Open format allows other cities to use this app.Available for iPhone.

Some of my favorite apps are those that engage. Visit Baltimore: Augmented reality allows users to find out about sites in any direction. Available for iPhone.

Participants in the webcast shared a host of apps that they found useful as well. This includes:

Car2Go: Find where you can share a car.Available for iPhone and Android.

Capital Bikeshare: Find where bikesharing stations are in Washington DC. Available for iPhone.

MetroPulse: The Chicago Metropolitan Planning Agency developed this app that shares regional metrics that support planning. Available for iPhone.

Zillow: A real estate app available nationwide available for all mobile device types.

CycleAtlanta and CycleTracks Austin are two examples of bicycling apps that support transportation planning. And several participants were interested and shared mobile apps for art walks, including in Sacramento, Columbus, and New York, and Surrey. In Burlington, Vermont an augmented reality app is underdevelopment that will provide historic information on buildings throughout the downtown.

We talked about sources of funding for apps. This included funding from the Federal Highway Administration for congestion apps. The FAA has hosted apps competitions. And of course many cities have hosted their own apps competitions.

We talked about GPS devices. I shared Dual Electronics GPS and another participant shared the AllSport GPS.

My favorite part was building the course introduction video. I had looked through many of the Coursera introduction videos. Many provided an excellent introduction by the professor to the course content, such as Jim Fowler’s Introduction to Calculus. Yet, when I stumbled upon the introduction to improvisation video I was blown away. The idea of actually showing what students learn, through improvisation was quite impressive. That along with the Chick Corea introducing how amazing instructor Gary Burton is really helped to capture why this course will be amazing. I’m sure that music students across the world will decide to take advantage of this experience.

For our own video, the course is about cities so I felt compelled to help integrate images and videos that capture the globes cities and the excitement of being in an urban environment. I had fun over a period of days deciding on a soundtrack that captures the tempo of a city. And pouring over hundreds of images of cities around the world to capture the best and most visually interesting. I also enjoyed going through my own photographic archive of images and pulling up memories of what I saw in these amazing cities.

Our quick effort resulted in a video that makes me excited about teaching the course! And my hope is that it will equally excite prospective students to want to learn about technology and our cities.

Many of the participants universities had recently signed onto various MOOC platforms such as Coursera, EdX, and Udacity. I raised questions, such as what should our role as planning educators be in MOOCs? Is this part of the land grant mission of many of our universities? What are the benefits of having well educated citizen planners? Is this a marketing opportunity to attract more students to our noble profession? What is the benefit that we are providing and the benefit we are receiving?

We all agreed that there is no business model yet, but should the lack of business model stop us collectively from proceeding with engaging in MOOCs. One audience member raised the concern about devaluing the university and our profession making the comparison to what has happened with the journalism and the rise of citizen journalists (blogging, etc).

After the session, several of us agreed that this is an important topic that merits further dialogue. I suggested that we bring this dialogue to our international joint ACSP/AESOP conference this summer in Dublin, Ireland.I put out a call on our planning listserv to find colleagues interested in collaborating on this session. Within a minute I had a response from Tom Sanchez of Virginia Tech, whom had expressed strong interest at the session in Cincinnati.

As I was pulling this panel together and reading more and more about MOOC’s, I thought how can we possibly have a strong dialogue when none of us has taught a MOOC. Sure we have plenty of experience in distance education, but not in the current iteration as MOOCs.

I asked Tom if he’d be willing to co-teach a MOOC with me. We both teach similar courses on technology for planners at our institutions. Tom was an eager and willing partner. I’m fortunate that Tom shares my get it done attitude. In just one short week we went from our idea to having a Coursera course ready to announce.

TechniCity is our brain child (should be live on Coursera in the next week). We took a look at what we were offering in our existing courses and thought about how we can broaden out a bit to make this a course of interest to a broad community. We debated who is our audience? City planners, of course! Urbanites, yes! Engineers and computer scientists, absolutely. Our course looks at how technology shapes our cities. Exploring how we design tools to engage with the public, how we analyze the city, the infrastructure the drives our cities growth, and the role that creative entrepreneurs have in making our cities great.

I’ve been absorbing everything I can about MOOCs. I’ve found that the student blogs have been particularly helpful in understanding what people enjoyed and did not enjoy about their courses. I signed up for three MOOC’s Social Network Analysis, Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, and Community Change in Public Health to get a handle on how these are structured, the positives and negatives. All of this helped in developing the concept of what TechniCity should be.

What role should the MOOC play? What is its purpose and what should participants get from it? I settled on the idea that a MOOC is a virtual salon. The French and Italians were famous for their salons during the 16th through 18th centuries. The basic idea is that a group of people would get together at the home of an inspiring host to have invigorating conversation and have fun. The idea of the MOOC as a salon resonated with me. The salon served as an informal university for women, allowing women to pursue a form of higher education. Women engaged in stimulating academic discussion. The salon hosts selected the subjects of the gatherings, focusing on social and political topics for example. The host played the role as mediator, directing the discussion.In my mind each MOOC course can serve as the salon, encouraging informal university education. My role is as the salon host, selecting the weekly topic for discussion. Students view and read about interesting topics and then engage in dialogue and share their experiences.

The challenge of course is how to create a salon-like atmosphere for thousands of students. Tom Sanchez and I are going to strive to experiment with a variety of opportunities for peer engagement. Similar to Charles Severance’s office hours for Internet History we’ll be organizing in person salons. Of course the point is that this is an online course and you shouldn’t need to go anywhere. So we will also be experimenting with a variety of online engagement opportunities. As city planners we are very interested in online engagement of citiizens. We should be thinking the same for our students. We welcome thoughts and ideas for how we can creating an engaging space for students to share their ideas and experiences.

Stay tuned. I’ll continue to report out on our experience in preparing for and teaching TechniCity.

Ohio State’s Digital First Initiative has been focusing on bringing more technology into every aspect of academia. I’m part of the advisory board and am the lead for the College of Engineering. This spring the College decided to invest in pilot ipad projects. We are supporting an inverted classroom in electrical and computer engineering, for example. The other pilot was to provide $30,000 to support the use of ipads in city and regional planning. This started over the summer with a project, led by Professor Charisma Acey, taking ipads into the field in Ghana. She shared her lessons learned this summer. Given her success I decided to give it a whirl.

I started with a simple proposition. How can I create a public engagement and field data collection process that can be entirely captured via ipad? How can I do this with minimizing the number of apps needed to accomplish this? How can we create and document processes so that the everyday planner could take what we have done in studio and take it out into the their practice?

It’s with those questions in mind that I set to work. This is a work in process and we are experimenting as we go along. So far we have set up the studio with just five apps, three of which are on every ipad (Photos, Safari and Mail). We are using dropbox, a free file sharing software. Dropbox is being used to transfer photos and other field data into a series of folders that are shared by everyone in the studio and our planning task force. The key app we are using is GISPro. Yes, it’s pricy at $300. However, we are gaining the ability to capture geocoded data, connect points to survey data, and lots of other spatial data out in the field. We can then export jpgs, shape files, and spreadsheet files for later analysis.

We then built a series of secure webpages that allow the studio team to connect through wifi and simply enter data as they move through a building. The studio team will be talking to users and asking them for feedback on their experience in the building. Team members will just enter the survey data as they go.As another example, in the image to the left, the students will be determining the occupancy in each facility. They just select the building, the floor, start a new sample and then they simply enter the number of people occupying a room and add any notes. If they observe anything interesting, they can move to the GIS Pro app.

The GIS Pro app identifies the current location and then with a quick tap of the finger the studio team member can lock in on the most accurate location within a building. They can then take a picture, enter descriptive information. And there is a survey tool that can be customized allowing for the capture of conditions information, for example. It’s easy to imagine how this could be easily adapted to other types of data collection. We are working out a protocol to complete origin/destination studies, asking users to describe how they got to campus and how they moved through the campus throughout the day. This can be mapped by simply moving your finger across the map, recording the various destinations along the way. This will allow us to more accurately capture the routes that pedestrians and cyclists take throughout the campus.

This studio will allow us to experiment with taking traditional planning tools, such as surveys, origin/destination studies, photo documentation, etc and take it to a new level through mobile technology. Studio starts on Monday. Stay tuned for updates on how these tools and protocols work. One of the students in the studio will be blogging our progress!

We also preparedthat Students Kevin Kohn, Brittany Kubinski, and Sam Robbins we shared with APA President Mitch Silver an overview of the report in a series of slides.

Through the workshop the students gained deeper handson experience using social media, had the opportunity to explore best practices n social media and offer ideas for how social media could be most effectively used in planning.

Topics of Conversation

There were several topics that were greatly discussed. Since the conference was in Los Angeles, LA was a common point of conversation. A number of topics that were highly discussed at the 2011 conference continued at the 2012 conference including transportation, public participation, technology and food. A number of topics were new among tweets at the 2012 conference, for example “Big Data” was a hot topic at this year’s conference. While, Delta Urbanism has been a major theme at the APA conference for several years, water and the Netherlands made it into the most tweeted about topics this year. Cycling was in part a hot topic because of the Ciclavia event, which brought out 100,000 cyclists including some of the conference attendees.

Thirty percent of the total #APA2012 tweets were retweets (so interesting that someone decided to forward it on)

Below are the most retweeted tweets of the conference (excluding retweets about announcing an event or session).  For Twitter newbies, retweeting is like forwarding an email to people you know. RT @evanscowley means that you are forwarding a Tweet from a user, in this example me.

RT @planetizen: @NelsonNygaard : “we don’t have an obesity epidemic, we have a sedentary lifestyle epidemic” #apa2012

RT @jominglau: NYC taking phones out of phone booths, and putting in wifi enabled tvs for engagement with community issues. Awesome #APA2012

RT @APA_Planning: Smart growth: On the cusp of the ‘next big thing.’ #APA2012 http://t.co/dWZqRaWr

RT @Cbartshire: Climate change is an issue of intergenerational equity. #apa2012

RT @ryangravel: In 1950, average size of housing in US was 950 sf; today 2,300 sf #APA2012

RT @urbandata: “To make #opendata useful for citizen engagement & planning, need more data literacy” @fkh & @synchronouscity #apa2012 #CPlan MT @npstorey

RT @terraplanner: ”America needs to fall back in love w/ planning again!” APA Pres   Mitchell Silver AICP @ opening keynote. #APA2012 http://t.co/czVZmAi0

RT @transportdata: New study: Vibrant downtowns lead to much less #sprawl – @MinetaTrans   http://t.co/08qf9YsG #smartgrowth #apa2012

RT @urbandata: What makes a successful #bikeshare station? Analysis @NextAmCity http://t.co/sqycZMmn #CPlan #apa2012 cc @cicLAvia @nycitybikeshare @hubway

RT @APA_Planning: Planners, there’s an app for that. Learn more at #APA2012 http://t.co/zMU54Fm1

RT @BTArchitects: Don’t make plans, learn also to make history #APA2012 #tacticalurbanism

RT @landpolicy: Scenario planning is all the rage #APA2012 Make tools open-source, standardize data, reduce complexity http://t.co/IkOdjKct

RT @RethinkTheAuto: Planning cities for cars debunked with wit and clarity in under 4 min.   http://t.co/bSIiwW4Z @ITDP_HQ #urbanism #apa2012

RT @transportdata: “The future of cities is in open data” -DC Director of Planning Harriet   Tregoning @OPinDC at #APA2012 conference. #CPlan MT @civichack

RT @APA_Planning: #APA2012 Opening Keynote: Communicating Climate Change. http://t.co/vCNNuaaO

RT @civichack: “The future of cities is in open data” -DC Director of Planning Harriet   Tregoning @OPinDC at #APA2012 conference. #opendata #CPlan

RT @DutchEmbassyDC: Ambassador @RJones_Bos gives closing keynote on Dutch approach to Living w/ Water at  #APA2012 conf. http://t.co/t4uilkiR

RT @EvansCowley: Thoughts on Community Engagement in Intelligent Cities http://t.co/CZCobsuT #APA2012

RT @fkh: Open source planning tools? Yes! Check out @landpolicy’s latest report at #APA2012 or online at   http://t.co/t3LSkihP

RT @nicadler: Excited 2 share @TheSunsetStrip’s story of hard work/collab over last 5 yrs w/ #apa2012. TY   @SoCal78 4 letting me & @AlfLamont tag along

RT @nlamontagne: Huge overflow for the tactical urbanism session at #APA2012 Quicker, lighter, cheaper (and more playful) is the #futureofplanning

RT @perlmaji: #APA2012 Boston’s bike share also reduced greenhouse gas emissions and increased economic activity.

RT @urbandata: Making a game out of town hall meetings: http://t.co/C9NObAR4 #gov20 #CPlan #APA2012 cc @Mind_Mixer MT @Richard_Florida

RT @USGBC: #APA2012 fact of the day: 56% of respondents prefer smart growth neighborhoods. http://t.co/Z5L2iSa2

RT @APA_Planning: Brand new! Get APA’s new mobile app for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch. #APA2012 http://t.co/ksrv5DVA

RT @elyanaja: Piano in a plaza for anyone to play. What a great public involvement/interaction method! #APA2012 #CityTalk http://t.co/v8wxGbHz

RT @fineplanner: #APA2012 tips for 2013: bring in food trucks, provide free wifi, don’t charge for a young planners mixer, try some #unconference sessions

RT @urbandata: Opening Access to Scenario Planning Tools: @landpolicy http://t.co/cUuiTks6 #APA2012 #CPlan #gov20

RT @FvanHovell: MT   @DutchEmbassyDC: Amb @RJones_Bos keynote address “Planning is Key Against Rising Seas” to #APA2012 http://t.co/pfHwYXQM

RT @kolisach: #apa2012 San Fran has had a “transit first” policy regarding streets since the   1970s. Prioritizes transit/ped/bike uses over autos.

RT @NikolaMiller:   “planners need to fall in love with planning again”APA Pres Mitch   Silver’s inspirational msg@this morn’s plenary #APA2012

RT @planetizen: #Planetizen’s  Managing Editor, Jonathan Nettler, blogs about the “winds of change” apparent at #APA2012 @ http://t.co/QiZ1Jdtl

RT @transportdata: “The freeway era is absolutely over in the United States” – Jeff Tumlin at #APA2012 cc @Richard_Florida @urbandata MT @adamhyslop #CPlan

For example “lifestyle epidemic”, “code diet” and “tactical urbanism”.  My favorite “Game Changer” became the buzz word heard both on and offline. Other key words that captured attention in tweets such as “verbal vomit team” and “gray tsunami.”

The Meaning of Our Tweets

At my session I described the use of sentiment analysis to help understand the meaning conveyed in a large group of tweets. To learn more about sentiment analysis I have a publicly available article on the topic. And conference attendee Harsh Prakash shared Twitter’s new sentiment analysis tool that lets you see the sentiment in the most recent posts from a hashtag. And I tweeted about USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab’s use of sentiment analysis in politics.

What are the sentiments that planners are expressing when tweeting about the conference? Are we angry, happy, or something totally different? Twitter’s analysis of the last 40 tweets of the conference showed that we are an overwhelmingly positive bunch, 95% positive tweets. Our analysis of all tweets from the conference expressed ten key sentiments. Our tweets are social, focused on the present, and expressing positive emotions. We are inclusive, talking about space and time, our work, and a sense of achievement. All of these sentiments embrace the essence of planning. This is exactly what one would hope to see at a conference where the use of Twitter is meant to support social interaction between unknown people with shared interests. I was so excited to see the badge additions that had the @ sign so people could add their Twitter handle. This made it so much easier to recognize the people we had been following online. It created the opportunity to network in a new way where there as a topic of common interest.

Who Participated?

A total of 691 different planners tweeted during the conference which is a wonderful number of participants, but what was the level of equality in participations. How many people were heavy Tweeters like me and how many were light users? Similar to other research about the use of social media a small number of people dominate the conversations with 3 percent of the users sending out 24 percent of the tweets. BUT, we can also see that we had a wide array of users with many participating one or a few times. For example, 32 percent of the tweets came from the 80 percent of participants who tweeted five or fewer times.

There were clearly key influencers at the conference whose tweets were frequently retweeted. The top 15 influencers at the conference included: @BTArchitects, @theplacematters, @TobiasSKC, @EvansCowley, @nlamontagne, @UrbanPolicyPlnr, @APA_Virginia, @arouault, @cookry, @counti8, @gabrielajuarez, @KSbiral, @LilleyPlanning, @Remon25P, and @rogersna07.

Blogging at the Conference

There was as noticeable uptick in attendees who blogged from the conference. Below are links to a number of the blogs created about sessions at the conference (I may have missed a few). This allowed attendees and followers to get the inside story on what was happening in the many sessions at the conference.

Granicus posted a series of blogs about Citizen Sourcing, participatory planning, community engagement in intelligent cities and other topics. Sasaki also wrote a series of blog posts for the conference, including Innovative Planning: Game-Changing Engagement. I shared a series of blog posts on mobile apps, intelligent cities, and LOLCATS. Josh Stephens shared a blog on SoCal Planning Directors Tell It Like It Is. Sophie O’Neill wrote up the session Rethinking Business as Usual in Planning.   Ann Dillemuth wrote Smart Growth: On the Cusp of the ‘Next Big Thing’. Andrew McGee in Go Beyond the Sessions shared what happened outside the convention center. Energov wrote a conference wrapup blog. Jonathan Nettler of Planetizen wrote a conference wrapup titled Winds of Change Blow through APA 2012.

So are there any urban planning trends that surprised–either by being here or by not being here? What were the trends at the APA 2012 conference not captured by Twitter? Let me know in the comments. 

My takeaway from the use of Twitter at the conference is that a significant number of people were able to use this medium to share and engage in conversations around planning topics that resonate with them. It provided a platform to engage in social conversations that helped people meet each other both on and off line.  What more could we ask for from social media in a conference? I look forward to even more participation at the 2013 conference in Chicago.

CycleTracks: Back in 2010, planners in San Francisco wanted to study bicycle users. CycleTracks is an app that uses GPS to record users bicycle trip routes and times, and creates a map of their ride. At the end of their ride the rider can choose to input information about the purpose of the trip. All of the information is sent to the San Francisco County Transportation Authority for analysis. The data excludes personally identifiable data. The Authority then uses the Cycle Tracks data to create models that help predict where cyclists will ride and how changes in transportation infrastructure and land use changes will impact the cycling community. After several months of data collection, the planners used the data to develop a bike route choice model.  This model was then used as part of the regional travel demand model and used in preparing the San Francisco Transportation Plan. Based on the success of CycleTracks, San Francisco has been working with Austin, texas and Monterey, California who are collecting CycleTracks data using San Francisco’s application and app. Lane County, Oregon is beta testing their own LaneTracks application and College Station, Texas developed the AggieTracks App.

PlanningVic: The Department of Planning and Community Development in Victoria, Australia provides planning information reports for any property in Victoria. By entering an address the person can see the property on a map and have a planning report delivered in a pdf format. The report includes parcel detail, utilities information, zoning information, and overlays.

Zoner: An architectural firm in New York developed an app that allows users to calculate the maximum buildable floor area for a property instantly. The user connects the city’s zoning database, enters the lot width and length etc and then it will calculate the buildable area. One user said “I work for a developer and we waste tons of doing what this app does in seconds. GREAT WORK!”

Learn about other apps in this Atlantic Cities article on Urban Planning in the iPhone Age. What apps are you using in planning?

We also prepared a series of slides that students Kevin Kohn, Brittany Kubinski, and Sam Robbins we shared with APA President Mitch Silver.

This student project was great opportunity to explore the potential of social media within professional associations.

Next week planners from across the country will be gathering for the National American Planning Association Conference in Los Angeles. I’ll be participating in several sessions, including APA’s Fast, Funny, and Passionate session, which is designed to entertain and educate. My pecha kucha is called “Pin, Post, and Push to Promote Planning.” The purpose is to share lessons about how planners can use social media to promote planning.

To get ready for the session, last week students at Ohio State University sent a survey out asking students and professionals from across the country for their ideas for how they would like to engage with APA and other professional organizations through social media platforms. We received lots of really great ideas. Many of the responses focused on creating fun ways to engage around planning topics. One creative student from Florida State University responded that we need more cats. Cats you may ask, what? Many of you may be familiar with the LOLCATS, a series of pictures of cats in silly locations asking for a cheeseburger. As soon as I saw this survey response, I knew that this would make it into my Fast, Funny, and Passionate session.

I had seen these cats, but asked friends on Facebook what they knew about LOLCATS. Cody Price, a planning student at Texas A&M University, sent me a link to the architectural LOLCATS, created by architecture students at UC Berkeley. Well, if architects have their own cats, why shouldn’t the planners! Myself and JohnGardocki, an undergrad city and regional planning student at Ohio State University, set out to create a series of LOLCATS for planners. Attend the Fast, Funny, and Passionate session to see our creations.

You are welcome to join us and submit your own City Planning LOLCAT at the following wordpress page, and suggest your own captions in the comments section below! Need help translating your captions, check out the LOLCATS translator. Now what caption should we put on this picture?

Take our poll of the day. What should the caption for this LOLcat be?

Cat lounging on the pedestrian deck on the new Main Street Bridge in Columbus, Ohio.